Anti-Gay Groups Stand By Disgraced Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore

Despite multiple allegations that Roy Moore sexually harassed underage girls when he was an Alabama prosecutor, his anti-LGBT supporters still have his back.

Moore, who has gone on record denying the accusations of sexual misconduct, spoke earlier this week at a Birmingham news conference where prominent religious conservatives reaffirmed their commitment to the U.S. Senate candidate, the Chicago Tribune reports.

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Among the speakers at the conference, Orthodox Rabbi Noson Shmuel Leiter, head of Torah Jews for Decency, blamed “homosexualist gay terrorism” for the attack on Moore’s campaign. “We need Judge Moore to stand up to the LGBT transgender mafia,” he said. “We need someone with a proven record of facing off against the gay terrorists.”

Texas Christian activist Steven Hotze took to the podium and described same-sex marriage as “just like a mirage—it’s phony and it’s fake.”

“We’re praising everything that God says is wrong and will destroy you,” added North Carolina-based Christian activist Flip Benham. “Homosexual sodomy destroys those who participate in that behavior and nations that approve of it.”

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Christian right blogger Elizabeth Johnston, who calls herself “The Activist Mommy,” declared that Moore’s opponent in the Senate rate, Democrat Doug Jones, “stands for the destruction of human life through abortion and the destruction of the natural family” through same-sex marriage.

“It made me extremely angry,” said transgender Birmingham resident Mackenzie Gray about the conference. “My fear with the religious leaders and the hateful rhetoric we’re hearing is that it’s going to start escalating into something even larger. It’s dangerous.”

A vociferous opponent of LGBT rights, Moore was suspended as Chief Justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court for the second time last year because he instructed judges to continue enforcing the state’s same-sex marriage ban months after Obergefell v. Hodges.

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Moore has praised Vladimir Putin’s views on homosexuality, which he’s compared to bestiality, and claimed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg should be impeached for ruling on marriage equality after officiating a same-sex wedding. He was also removed from a 1996 custody case after he denied visitation rights to the children’s mother because she was a lesbian.